last week, I was in Dubai where the @b3dotfun team co-hosted an event with @Google in their offices for the 100+ attendees who wanted to dive deep on crypto gaming & learn more about B3
there - I realized that, admittedly, I've not done a great job of publicly explaining the @b3dotfun vision for blockchain scaling to the community (outside of our investors & partners ofc - guess it's time to spend less time in the trenches building & more time raising awareness)
why did we need to build a separate blockchain for gaming?
We're proudly @base aligned, with a lot of team members coming from @coinbase
to build this vision. In our DNA is a reputation for not just building for theoretical scale, but actually dealing with high-pressure real-world (with dollars on the line) applications that had to deal with 20m+ requests/second throughput.
building enterprise web2 infra isn't the same as building a blockchain, but similar lessons apply (as is true in most engineering)
at the core - and to oversimplify; there are 2 approaches to scaling:
scale vertically - ie: increase throughput (more txns, faster blocks, etc)
scale horizontally - ie: distribute load over more instances
Base is working towards scaling vertically. They have a mission to hit a scaling gas target (currently at 32 mgas/second at time of this post).
This is equivalent of having a machine, and optimizing it, improving performance & scale (obviously more complex in practice - especially in a decentralized distributed system)
But there's a drawback to this - which is that a single one-size fits all system isn't actually 100% one-size fits all.
As a simple example:
Imagine you are a game developer
Imagine you wish to put a LOT of content onchain (we can debate the reasons why, but for now just assume you want all game state or something to live onchain)
In this system, you compete with all the other parties that wish to fill blocks: defi txns, memecoin traders, bots, snipers, staking, etc
If you do the math - it doesn't just become an issue with throughput, but also economics. Really quickly, you'll realize that as a game developer you might go bankrupt just sending txns for your game.
Even with more throughput and localized gas fee markets, the problem remains the same. And arguably from Base's perspective, it's not even a problem, it's a feature. You WANT some economic security baked into the gas fee, which makes both the ecosystem and defi (high value txns) sustainable.
But in gaming, your revenue model might not be tied to more txns - and at scale gaming throughput requirements are likely beyond current thresholds.
So what do you have to do? Comprise - do less txns, or try to optimize more, or move more stuff offchain.
What if there's another option?
A case for horizontal scaling on B3
Okay - so what if instead, you could settle transactions on a dedicated blockchain designed just for gaming? You would no longer be competing with other txn types, oh and also - the gas would be a log scale cheaper because it's a L3.
Oh also - you can still keep your defi on Base (in fact, we even recommend this to games - you'd benefit from existing DEX and CEX routes in the Base ecosystem)
Sounds pretty cool right?
Well it's already a reality on B3 - and we'd invite you to do this today (hit us up @b3dotfun)
This is essentially a horizontal scaling approach.
And in fact, it continues to scale even if we were to hit throughput limits (which we haven't yet).
Imagine then, that you are a serious enterprise gaming studio, with millions of txns per day that you'd want to land. Well, we have a concept called GameChains - which are essentially managed infra & blockspace dedicated just for your use case. These gamechains settle on B3, and gas is another magnitude cheaper (basically free at this point) since it's an L4.
We'll be deploying gamechains with flagship partners like @Sanctuary_B3 @parallel @InfiniGods @reachlabs_net @SuperGamingNPC and more.
Ugh - don't we have enough blockchains?
I think this is a fair initial reaction towards the idea of more rollups and a horizontally scaling approach.
But, I challenge you to ask yourself if this is because of bias towards your favorite current flavor of blockchain - whether it's @base or @solana or whatever (ofc you want them to succeed & have less "competition").
In fairness, for many use cases (like defi for example) this can be annoying.
But - consider the following:
We are converging on advancements in wallet abstraction, chain abstraction, and account abstraction (smart accounts) that continue to make meaningful improvements to chain switching (or lack of)
In gaming specifically, many games are not browser based (desktop, console or mobile) and utilize embedded wallets or global accounts which make chain switching invisible (thanks to some tech from @b3dotfun)
So from a UX perspective, you won't even notice where the txns settle - just that it happened.
None of these ideas are new of course, the idea of having a high usage application that sticks all of it's throughput through a single layer (like a MongoDB database for example) is uncommon.
In reality, in software engineering we use several services & layers like Redis, microservices, Cloudflare, etc to distribute load and not have single points of failure.
Why shouldn't it be the same in blockchains?
It's totally fine imo to have application specific or use case specific blockchains, as long as you are not detracting from the user experience.
How are you gonna make money if gas is that cheap?
We aren't probably gonna make that much from it. But that's not bearish.
Sure, the volume & scale probably make up some of the loss in a higher gas fee.
But ultimately, ask yourself this:
What happens in a future where the top ecosystems have ample blockspace and compete to sell this blockspace to others?
If @base competes with @solana who competes with 100 other L1s & L2s, and all parties continue to make improvements to both throughput and bandwidth...
My theory is that over a longer horizon, the "price" of blockspace goes marginally above the cost of hosting that blockspace (much like cost computing does - ie, AWS must keep their rates competitive with Google & the long tail of providers; Digitalocean, Railway, Vercel, etc). All of which trend down over time as we make things more efficient.
So - then if selling blockspace is ultimately a business with compressing margins, what is the value of a blockchain?
Well - it's in providing value to it's users, builders, and businesses.
Value can be a lot of things, sometimes it's "culture" or "vibes", other times it can be more explicit like privacy, support, distribution.
The value of B3
Okay, so what's the value of B3? If we aren't that interested in selling blockspace, and in fact - will "sell it to you" (super cheap gas) for basically free (or a thin margin), what the hell are we doing?
Laser focused team who spends all day 24/7 thinking about how to succeed in crypto gaming
People who deeply understand the pains, truths, and demands of gaming studios & gamers
Protocol level support & smart contracts for gaming specific use cases
Open ecosystem with world class tooling, SDKs, and infra for builders + great commercials pre-negotiated to keep your costs sustainable
Ecosystem growth in the form of strategic incentives, revenue sharing, and publishing - you shouldn't have to build a moat around your users, instead be incentivized (in optimism style model) to share users & grow the pie
Largest token holder community for gaming on Base
If we're missing anything - let us know (or DM me). This vision was enough for me to want to leave Coinbase and obsess relentlessly about this with my awesome co-founders @viktoriya0x & @darylX24
Crypto gaming remains one of the best ways to grow the pie for the masses in blockchain, and we're still early.
